The state of collapse is activated at the point of total helplessness. It is usually accompanied by a thought, or a sense, that the fight is over. I remember this moment clearly: as my attacker held the knife hard against my throat, I thought to myself: When he’s finished, he’s going to kill me.
In these calm moments the brain surveys the scenario one final time for possible escape routes. In most traumatic situations, it is this moment in which the body resigns itself to death that the mind finds a way to survive.
I noticed a glass bottle sitting to the right of the toilet bowl, leaning slightly against the door. I bent over – feeling, in that moment, none of the pain in my body – grabbed the bottle, and smashed it over the porcelain lid of the toilet bowl. This startled him for only a few seconds, but it was enough. As he tried to figure out the source of the loud smash, the flying glass and the reverberations as my elbow hit the door of the stall when it recoiled from the effort of breaking the glass, I reached for the door, unlocked it and ran away.
I ran down the stairs. I found my friends looking desperate, casting their eyes around the street wildly, panicked, wondering where I could have gone. Together, the four of us ran around the corner and I collapsed.
All I remember from those moments is the sound of my gasping breath, the strength of my hands as I clutched my stomach, my pitchy sobs and the only words I could muster: It hurts.
My oldest friend sprung to her feet and ran in the direction of the attacker, but he was gone. None of us would ever see him again.
As she came back, a taxi pulled up with its yellow light on, and I remember insisting that I was fine and just needed to go home. I piled myself into the car and gave the driver my address, hoping against hope that on that particular night I had saved enough money from the karaoke bar for the ride home, like I usually did. My body shook uncontrollably in the back seat.
I snuck into the house, making sure my parents wouldn’t notice me come in through the side entrance. I didn’t want them to worry. My room was in the back of the house, with its own bathroom, so hiding from them was easy. I fell into the shower, bleeding everywhere, staring blankly into a tiled abyss and thinking only of the sound that thick glass makes when it smashes.
I got up the next morning as usual. I washed the stale cigarette smell out of my hair. I told my coaches I had twisted my ankle so I could stay away from the gym while the bruises healed. I went to school on the Monday and told stories about the cheesy pop songs we had sung about the embarrassing crushes we couldn’t let go of. I waited for the bruises to fade and went back to training. I told no one. My friends knew that something had happened but I brushed off any questions they had and we never spoke about it again. I was too scared to revisit that night. We all were. We were just kids.
I was fifteen.
This was around the time my friends were losing their virginity to their high-school sweethearts and it was all we could talk about. I pushed the pain and the trauma of this event so far into the darkest corners of my mind that all I could think about those next few weeks was whether or not I was still a virgin.
What would I say the next time someone asked me? To say I’d never had sex would be a lie, but it was far preferable to recounting anything close to the truth. The truth was unspeakable.
I had been talking to a boy on Myspace who was older than me and had just graduated from my high school. I started going over to his house when his parents weren’t home. After a few encounters, he asked me if I’d had sex before and I said no. I jumped at the opportunity.
That day I resolved the question of my virginity once and for all. It was 22 January 2008. I know this because it was the day Heath Ledger died, and we spoke about it in the car when he dropped me home.
That experience felt almost as bad as the rape itself, except there was even more shame because I had chosen it. My body burned for days and days afterwards, and I was left with a piercing pain in my abdomen.
Never again, I promised myself.
He drove me home and then stopped speaking to me, as many eighteen-year-old boys would do. I was crushed, probably in a desperately out-of-proportion way, because I thought that engaging in consensual sex would erase my assault. But it didn’t work.
During that encounter the condom broke, so the next day I found myself, not yet sixteen, standing in a chemist waiting for the morning after pill. The pain in my abdomen was so severe that I fell to the ground as my friend and I left the chemist. So I went back to pretending nothing had happened, and promised myself I would never think or talk about sex again for as long as I lived. This strategy worked almost seamlessly for a while, but at my most vulnerable and volatile moments, parts of it would spill out of me. Once, I got drunk at a party and told an almost-complete stranger.
I was raped, I whispered to her, slurring. I didn’t see her again until months later, when she showed up at a house party I was hosting, hugged me kindly and said, I’ll never tell anyone. A friend and I got our drinks spiked when we were nineteen and I told her the story, over and over and over again, like I was a broken record stuck on a single graphic song.
When these pieces of the story leaked out of me, I barely recognized them as my own. I questioned whether the memory was real. I searched for it consciously but could find only fragments of it that refused to align themselves in a way that made sense to me. I convinced myself I had imagined it. This project made the random but semi-regular confessions to strangers all the more distressing. I was ashamed of admitting that this had happened to me, but then I would remind myself of the story I had created to numb the first shame: that it had never happened at all. I felt ashamed of a lie I hadn’t told, but after a while I realized that the shame of thinking I had lied was easier to manage than the shame of admitting I hadn’t.
Years later, I would come across The Body Keeps the Score, by Dr Bessel van der Kolk. The culmination of a life’s work, the book gives a neurobiological, psychosocial and psychiatric account of post-traumatic stress. It outlines the ways in which traumatic events have lasting impacts on the immune system, the nervous system, the muscular system and the brain.
About two years after my assault, I was struck down by unbearable abdominal pain. I vomited from the force of it. I started to bleed everywhere. Blood poured down my legs and pooled around my feet. I passed out. I began to have a constant, intrusive thought about a knife being plunged into my vagina. This is what trauma scholars call a ‘felt memory’; it is my body’s way of recalling how the rape felt, but because the memory itself is locked away, the brain comes up with an alternative memory to represent the feeling. As far as I know, my attacker did not actually plunge his knife into me, but this is how my body interpreted the feeling that my mind refused to acknowledge.
This happens just before the actual fragments of the memory return to the conscious mind. It is a sign that the memory is catching up with you. Hunting you down. I kept running, I ran faster, from him, from the memory, from the pain. But it didn’t work. I started having nightmares about the attack, in tiny fragments, and would wake up screaming and shaking, and ashamed that I had let him back into my head.
Over the next few years my body started to break down, physically, in a way that I assumed to be entirely unconnected to the event I had tried so hard to forget. I lost my sense of balance and any degree of connection to my body. I stopped being able to perform gymnastics routines I had long ago perfected. My coaches and fellow athletes knew something was wrong, but when they asked I couldn’t explain it. I lost all sense of my physical self. I started injuring myself at training as a consequence of being unable to know precisely where the different parts of me begun and ended. I remember picking myself up after disastrously under-rotating on a round-off-flip layout and casting my eyes around the gym in search of something that could explain the fall. Had the mats shifted underneath me? Had I tripped on another athlete’s abandoned ankle strap? No answers presented themselves.
In trauma discourse, this is described
as a loss of ‘proprioception’: the ability of the mind to gauge effectively the relationship between the body and everything external to it. Proprioception is how the mind tells the body how to move through the world, how to control its most delicate movements, how much space it takes up.
I read once that the reason cats can shape-shift to fit themselves into remarkably small spaces is that the tips of their whiskers are biologically coded to be exactly the same width as the widest parts of their body. They use them as a kind of proprioceptive radar. All of a sudden I was without that sense, unable to orient myself, never quite sure which parts of the world I could fit into and which I couldn’t. I had a major fall in the try-outs for my second world championships. I injured my ankle so badly that my sports doctor told me I would be lucky if I went for a jog again. I have barely set foot on a gym floor since.
I have also learned from reading the psychiatrist Peter Levine that something else important happened in my brain on the night of the attack. The ways in which we store memories can be broadly classified into two categories: declarative memories and procedural memories. Declarative memories are the ones we can explicitly recall, fully formed. They have been stored in the brain as narrative experiences, as stories about our lives. Procedural memories, on the other hand, are subconscious. They live in the body, in the muscles and joints and blood. The body remembers how to conduct certain procedures without having to think about them. This is ‘muscle memory’.
So there I was, fifteen years old, with ten years’ worth of procedural memories in my back pocket. My muscles knew the feeling of a perfect handstand, of the correct take-off for a somersault. I never had to think about these things, the instructions lived deep inside my bones.
But what happened on that night in the bathroom in 2007 was so acutely life-threatening that it engendered in my brain a new, much more powerful form of procedural memory: the knowledge of how the body freezes when it needs to escape, the hyper-vigilance with which the body senses danger, the desperate need to run away. Because these procedural memories are, from an evolutionary perspective, much more important than everyday tasks such as showering, getting dressed, making a cup of tea, they take over. The psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton describes these new, overriding procedural memories as an ‘indelible image’. A ‘death imprint’.
Entering the state of collapse is useful in moments of real danger, but once we live through it once and survive, the brain can rewire itself to be on high-alert in any subsequent moments of helplessness, no matter how serious or life-threatening they are, and collapse can become a state we enter regularly. We find ourselves re-entering a frozen state at the passing of a loud car, a door slammed too heavily, a sudden burst of laughter from a nearby table at a restaurant.
My body’s fight, flight or freeze response became my only form of procedural memory; like trauma itself, it destroys everything in its path. Muscle memories of perfect technique and form that I had spent my entire life building were erased in seconds by the need to survive.
The loss of my athletic self was a profound one, and for months I pretended I could get past it, return to my gymnastics world as if nothing had happened. Deep down I knew it was over, but accepting this was devastating.
I am like this with most things. Acceptance and loss are profoundly difficult for me to process. I am overly sentimental. I hoard things. I cling to memories even when they have become so distant they feel like fantasies. I cling to fantasies as though they are memories. As David Foster Wallace famously wrote, ‘Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.’ Sometimes I think that should be written on my tombstone.
As I was processing the fact that my athletic career was over, I began experiencing a series of organic failures that grew, developed and shape-shifted over the seven years that followed. First my bladder, then my appendix, then my uterus, then my bowel. My body, which had once been so obedient, started to unravel.
I watched this happen as if I were standing outside myself, as if I were watching a broken-down car splutter to a halt and burst into flames. I had no means whatsoever of understanding what was happening, so instead of inspecting the damage, I ran from it, left the shell of my body where it had fallen and ignored it for years.
Here’s what I now know my body was doing while I pretended I could wish it away. When an everyday event concludes, the brain places it in a sequence, understanding how each moment, each event, led to the next, and analysing the experience based on this narrative.
But traumatic memories get stuck. They cannot be rearranged into logical narratives, and instead remain trapped in the brain as flashes of light, sound and smell – rogue fragments of an unbearable memory that leak out at the mind’s weakest moments. As a result, instead of understanding these stimuli as past events, the brain reacts to these fragments of memory as though the event is still happening. The part of the brain responsible for separating the past from the present – the hippocampus – becomes dysfunctional and the brain reenters fight, flight or freeze every time it is reminded of the experience. The past bleeds into the present, again and again and again.
The hippocampus is closely connected to the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for our most basic emotions: fear, joy, safety, grief. If the hippocampus fails to store away a memory as a past experience, it forces us to relive the memory every time the amygdala senses danger – whether that be a sense of actual danger or a fragment of the traumatic memory itself, which can be as benign as a certain song, a particular bird call, the smash of a wine glass knocked over at a dinner party.
Unlike other memories that can be safely stored away by the hippocampus, traumatic memories stay alive. They lie in wait and then move through us like breath. A death imprint.
This confusion then extends to the entire nervous system. The body’s autonomic nervous system has two separate modes: the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is the fight-or-flight response, and the parasympathetic nervous system its opposite: its job is to calm the body down when the threat has passed.
When a person is traumatized, their sympathetic nervous system becomes disastrously overactive. It kicks into fight, flight or freeze at the smallest hint of danger or reminder of a traumatic event. The parasympathetic nervous system becomes weak and dysfunctional: its usual tricks for calming the body down degrade over time as the sympathetic nervous system takes over.
This has a profoundly damaging effect on the body when it is allowed to continue for weeks, months or years. The autonomic nervous system suspends all physical functions not considered necessary for escape, and sends blood and oxygen to the major muscle groups, ready to run. Anything not needed for immediate escape is brought to a standstill.
This means that in traumatized people, the body’s primary organs – the stomach, the liver, the kidneys, the bowel – freeze up, sometimes for hours at a time, sometimes every day, whenever the autonomic nervous system is triggered by a memory or a flash of fear. These organs then have to restart once the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in. This leads to an exhausting process of near-constant stagnation and rebirth. Eventually, the systems and organs start to wither under the weight of it.
The longer a physical assault or accident is held in the nervous system, the muscles and the brain, without being addressed or treated, the more likely it is that it will manifest as a systemic physical disorder or dysfunction. The patient faces a future defined by illness as penance for being unable to escape an unbearable past.
Medical professionals now believe that the digestive system’s dysfunctional response to untreated trauma can be one of the causes of abdominal disorders such as irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn’s disease and endometriosis. New research suggests that it is possible that the long-term physiological impacts of trauma can also cause multiple sclerosis, migraines, fibromyalgia, some cancers and generalized chronic pain.
This research is in its early stages and, of course, the
re are other causes for these conditions. But for the first time, the medical profession is acknowledging that untreated trauma can lead to one – or more – of these disabilities.
It had never occurred to me that my physical ailments, all appearing in the same part of me, at the same time, could have a common cause.
And perhaps they don’t. There is no exact formula for causation, no matter how desperately we might wish for one. My chronic physical illnesses could have been caused by any number of things, or an intricate combination of several factors, or just bad luck. I’ll never know for sure.
But there is one thing I finally know to be true: one way or another, the body keeps the score.
III
This home is empty now. —
Rupi Kaur, ‘I’m taking my body back’
ABSTRACTIONS
In December 2009, two years after the assault, I was hospitalized for acute abdominal pain associated with an alarming amount of bleeding and vomiting. A sexual assault specialist would tell me nearly a decade later that this timing is precisely what she would expect to see in the development of physiological symptoms of sexual trauma.
Years later, I would be diagnosed with endometriosis and Crohn’s disease, both of which are organic disorders that doctors believe might be connected to untreated trauma. But the process of getting to these diagnoses was disheartening and torturous and humiliating. I remember so clearly the day it all began: 17 November 2009; I sat in a Sydney emergency department coiled over myself in pain, wondering what on earth could have happened to me. I didn’t realize, then, how many more times I would have to do this.
I Choose Elena Page 2